Workers control

How Workers Run Argentina’s “Recuperated Workplaces”
From Global Labor Strategies
In a previous post, we described the process by which workers in 200 workplaces in Argentina occupied their workplaces and began running them themselves.

In this post we will examine how the workplaces are actually run and how their workers are dealing with the managerial, economic, legal, and political questions that arise when workers try to run their own workplaces.

Much of our information comes from a new book edited by Marina Sitrin called “Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina” (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006).

After workers had occupied their workplaces and, if necessary, warded off the efforts of former bosses and police to take them back, what happened next?

In half of the occupied workplaces, the managers simply left. (Ironically, at least one survey has found that the workplaces are more productive in the cases where the management left.)

In many workplaces, the workers had worked together for years, even decades. The occupation and defense also generated strong bonds.

Workers had the recent models of the highly fluid piquetero movements and the direct democracy of the neighborhood assemblies that developed out of the “rebellion” at the end of 2001.

Their approach to running the recuperated workplaces similarly tended to involve a highly fluid form of direct democracy, though no single model prevails. A worker at the Clinica Medrano health clinic explains,

“Diverse groups of people have reclaimed their workplaces, and each has different structures, affiliations, and relationships. We’re politically independent. All our decisions as a cooperative are resolved in the assembly. Everything is dealt with there, even the smallest individual problems, like changes in our schedules. We do this partly so we don’t make mistakes.”

Both the experience of takeovers and the general climate of the broader Argentine social movement was highly egalitarian.

According to a survey, 70 percent of the recuperated workplaces distribute wages equally to all workers; 15 percent follow a more traditional division. Workgroups who had extended conflicts with their employers were more likely to opt for equal wages. Read more

http://laborstrategies.blogs.com
/global_labor_strategies/2007/02/running_argenti.html#more

capitalist crisis severe